I Can't Believe It's... Butter!
Opening this book is the literary equivalent of walking into a lunatic asylum. Don't get me wrong, that's not necessarily a negative comment: a lunatic asylum has the potential to be an amusing, if disturbing, place for a sane person to be in the short-term. As is being inside the strange world of Mr Landen and co. The reader is introduced to Wyndham caravan park, where the manager, 19 year old Sally Cooper, is being accosted by Lupus, a seven foot talking rabbit. And that's just the first page... It emerges that Sally's new tenant Teena, New Scientist Playmate, Oxford graduate and owner of the limousine of caravans, is responsible for the emergence of the rabbit in her quest to find Sally a boyfriend as 'perfect' as her own. It doesn't get any less trippy from there; while Sally is being attacked by a chef wearing S + M gear who wants to cook her, Teena tries to give the rabbit a makeover, an attempt which results in both her fiance and rabbit seeking refuge in a closet. Together.
Having narrowly escaped being raped by a rabbit and cooked by a sado-masochist, Sally is given a seemingly impossible task by her boss, Uncle Al: he wants the caravan park to win the council's Dullness award, their bid to attract tourists scared off by the death rates. Meanwhile Teena is on a 'quiet' country walk, meeting a Damien Hirst wannabe and persuading him to give her his cow- which he had planned to wallpaper- for a kiss. After smothering it with anti-gravity cream, she has a bionic flying cow. Wouldn't a can of Red Bull have been simpler?
Returning to 'the world's biggest ever mobile home', she finds that her assistant, the brainless Mr Lamden, has locked her out until she lets him marry the bunny. Contradictory to the title, it emerges that Mr Lamden DOES have a brain, or rather did...a brain that has been replaced by a tub of margarine by his students when he wasn't looking. Meanwhile Teena's tenant and prospective bridesmaid Gary has been kidnapped by baboons in Tanzania. It's like the Really Wild Show on E.
Now we move into the mind of Daisy the floating cow, who has acquired attitude as well as wings, a criminal cow intent on murdering Sally and Teena with a mind-machine. Sally awakes in chains, and,once rescued by her pet squirrel Mr Bushy discovers that her uncle wishes to give the cow an executive post as his motivational coach. I'm thinking this was probably written before foot and mouth prevented cows from working in offices.
Teena has a proposition for Sally; to remove her brain and swap it for the Flora inside Mr Landen's head, so that she can use the mind-machine on him and persuade him to let her into the caravan. It doesn't go down well. So she persuades Mr Landen that she's holding the bunny hostage (the margarine has by now melted, leaving him wholly retarded) and kills him once he opens the caravan door. The idea is to turn him into a twentieth century Frankenstein, but he is kidnapped by a herd of evil cows before their plan can be enacted.... For those of you that are entertained by the strange, strange world of Stephen Walker, a man who thinks he was brought up by wolves, a man who dedicates his book "for bunny rabbits," I'll leave the rest as a surprise; and yes, it does get weirder... For those that have no intention of reading literary 'trip-hop', I'll shut up. I'd recommend keeping this book by the toilet: it's funny, fast-moving and surely fuelled by more drugs than you could ever keep in your bathroom cabinet, but spend too long reading it and it becomes flushable; either that or you'll probably start hearing 'the voices' and start dating animals. Stephen Walker...funny guy, but maybe he should be running a zoo, not writing about one.
Sam Brunner
26th Apr 2001